Tourist visa vs. resident visa

Recently on the Facebook page Move to Mexico, someone posted a question about overstaying the 180-day limit on their tourist (FMM) visa, and one of the answers included a link to this helpful article: Your Mexico Visitors Permit, FMM, published July 10, 2017.

When I moved to Mexico in 2008, I drove across the border, purchasing both a tourist visa and a TIP (temporary import permit for my car) at the Immigration building at the border. Then, within the allotted 180 days, I traveled back to the U.S. by car and renewed both documents for another 180 days. After nearly two years of this, I got tired of the long trips that were not always ideally timed, and I wanted to bring in more than the allotted US$300 worth of goods, so I applied for a temporary resident visa (then called FM3, now called RT or Residente Temporal).

After four years of residing full time in Mexico on a temporary visa, I applied for a permanent resident visa (formerly FM2, now RP or Residente Permanente), which at the time could be had for the same payment as the RP renewal once you had four years of continuous residency under the RP.

The law has since changed, and now it’s harder to get a resident visa because the threshold of monthly income from the U.S. or other foreign country has gone up, and Immigration is looking closely at the source of the monthly income: you can’t just transfer money back and forth from savings to checking any more.